This presentation will focus on the experiences in elite higher education institutions (HEIs) and in labour markets of French young people from ‘diverse’ backgrounds, more specifically the small minority of them that has benefited from widening participation programmes. Adopting a Weberian approach, it will explore whether being perceived as representing ‘diversity’, together with these students’ volume and type of capitals (Bourdieu 1986), constitutes a barrier or an asset in stepping into elite settings (Naudet 2018), and in the interaction with three interrelated forms of organisation of the distribution of life chances: membership, meritocracy and market (Brown, 2000). ‘Diversity’ has become a convenient catchword to designate persons who do not meet the white middle-class norm (Warikoo, 2016). In the French context, the expression ‘coming from a diverse background’ is used to refer to lower-class youngsters, especially those belonging to a visible ethnoracial minority, having grown up in disadvantaged urban and school settings. The presentation will examine the narratives of forty ‘diverse’ master graduates from one of the most elitist French HEIs and the first to introduce a ‘diversity’ programme in 2001. These narratives were collected through long semi-structured interviews. It will also use information collected through interviews with professors and administrative staff in charge of the diversity programme, the masters’ programmes and the careers service. The analysis will emphasize that these students’ ‘diversity’ is an asset to be admitted into elite HEis, but neither prevents them from facing significant meritocratic academic barriers and social barriers concerning membership in informal groups dominated by upper-class students, nor protects all of them from having to work part-time to pay for their studies (Jack, 2019). It will also highlight the additional barriers that these students face in the labour market. Again, ‘diversity’, viewed by employers as a combination of certain physical and cultural features and personal qualities such as drive and motivation, can be an asset. However, the students themselves, although they have learnt in the prestigious HEI attended to distinguish carefully ‘prestigious’ jobs from others (Binder et al., 2016), tend to feel ‘short’ (Silva, 2013) both academically and socially, which leads many of them to apply for occupations and positions where neither academic credentials nor an elite background are key factors (Tholen, 2020) or to choose self-employment. These strategies allow them to avoid direct competition from ‘non-diverse’ graduates but reduce the economic returns they could expect from their studies.

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